What is creativity and how does it work in the brain? Are all brains creative? And what does that tell us about the evolution of species and the evolution of ideas? How do the arts expose what's happening in the brain, and what does that have to do with how cell phones got their names? And why koala bears don't write novels. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we dive into our three pound universe to uncover the
most surprising secrets behind our daily lives. Today's episode is about creativity. What is it and how do brains do it? And why do human brains do it better than anyone else in the animal kingdom? So I'm going to start tangentially with two stories that have hit the news in recent weeks. The first is that there are no fewer than nine copyright infringement lawsuits raging in the courts right now, with groups suing Open Ai and Meta and other companies
for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, the groups suing are creatives, they're writers, and they're suing because their books were consumed in the training of these massive generative AI systems, these large language models like CHATCHPT. So one of the suits calls this quote systematic theft on a mass scale. In other words, the suit asserts that these large language models are producing nothing fundamentally new. They're just recycling the
old and they're remixing that in different way ways. Okay, so that was one story. The second story in the news is that the company under Armour made an advertisement that featured a boxer named Anthony Joshua, and this set off a firestorm on Instagram because this claimed to be the first AI powered sports commercial. Now the critics are hating on it because they say the ad is just repurposing work from other humans other creatives without proper acknowledgment.
And the debate around both these stories is highlighting the broad issue of whether AI is going to undermine human creativity because it treats all the accomplishments of previous artists just as training data for doing its own thing, for generating its own content, which it then takes credit for. So many creatives are arguing that AI is going to diminish the value of human creativity. It simply remixes things
that act o people have done before it. So that's what I want to talk about today, because human creativity is the most important reason our species has achieved what it has. When you fly over a forest and you look down on it from an airplane, the species in that forest are doing the same thing that they were
doing one hundred thousand years ago. There's no difference. But when you reach your destination and you're coming into any modern city, you can see that the landscape has been so influenced by one single species that it looks like a giant, colorful motherboard of buildings has risen out of the ground. There's something really different going on about humans, And it's a reasonable question to ask, why don't squirrels design elevators, Why don't alligators invent speedboats? Why don't koalas
spend their free time building an internet to surf? So we're going to get into that shortly. Let me just say that the reason we are communicating over a podcast, shooting zeros and ones across the planet to transmit a message from one human mouth to multiple human ears, is because we are doing something very different than any other species. We have occupied every corner of the planet. We have a million human beings above the clouds at any moment
because of air travel. We have humans floating in the International Space Station, and we've landed on other orbiting bodies like the Moon, and our machines have landed on Mars. And no other animal has even invented the wheel or discovered fire, much less coordinated millions of its congeners into kingdoms and nations. So let's be clear that there's something
very different going on with our species. Homo sapiens represents a runaway species, and that term the runaway species is in fact the title of a book that I wrote with my close friend Anthony Brandt. Anthony is a professor of music composition at the Shepherd School of Music, which is part of Rice University, and generally he is a sharp and sensitive thinker about creativity and he's a real
student of the brain. So years ago he and I were getting a cup of coffee and we started talking about creativity from the psychology point of view, from the neuroscience point of view, from the point of view of artistic endeavor, and we realized that our views on this converged so much so that we both learned a lot and we realized that we had a framework for understanding what the creative act is, and we ended up writing
this book together. So I called up Anthony today to be part of this conversation with me, and I started by asking him what NASA and Picasso have in common.
You know, back in nineteen seventy there was the famous incident where the Apollo thirteen spacecraft completely lost power, three astronauts lives hanging in the balance, and the NASA engineers basically had just a few hours to improvise a solution, and they had a very closed system. All they could use to save those wonderful lives was what was on board the spacecraft, and they had to use a shrink wrap to help make an air scrubber. They had to
power the main capsule with the lunar module. Everything that they did was spur of the moment, working together as an amazing team bringing home the astronauts safely. Cut to Picasso working alone in his studio near the turn of the twentieth century painting this radical painting, the likes of which no one had ever seen before, and he was so nervous about it. He invited his mistress at the time, his gallery distributor to come, and they laughed at it,
and he was feeling so uncomfortable and a shame. He actually rolled up the painting and hid it in his closet, but he kept feeling drawn to it, kept working on it, but still when he finished, he wasn't even quite sure he was finished, rolled it up again, put it in his closet for nine years, and then put it out into the world and became one of the breakthrough paintings
of the twentieth century. Le Demoiselle Davignan. And so you've got the NASA engineers working collaboratively, Picasso working all by himself. The NASA engineers with a very targeted result. What they do has to work, it has to succeed otherwise the astronauts parish. Picasso is doing something much more open ended and speculative. He's inventing a new type of art. And yet when you look carefully at what they were doing, essentially their brains were doing very similar mental operations. They
were creating variations on things that were already there. They were tearing up the world as they knew it and putting it back together in new ways, and they were mixing things in combinations that hadn't existed before, and each was applying it in their own domain, but under the hood of their brains what was happening is very deeply related.
And it seems to be the key with creativity, right is absorbing everything in the world around you, absorbing your own experiences, and then remixing them, making something new out of it. And what we did when we wrote our book together is outlined sort of three different ways that this can happen, three different cognitive operations that the software of the brain is running. So tell us about those three operations. So we called them bending, breaking, and blending.
Bending is making a copy and altering it. So fonts are a great example of bending. I mean, why do we need different typefaces for the same letters. They convey the same information. But we have this compulsion to bend, and so we create this unbelievable proliferation of variations. Jazz improvisation is a type of bending. Different car models are a type of bending. Anytime you take a prototype and you remake it in some way, that's.
A version of bending. So breaking involves taking something complete and deconstructing it, tearing apart, pulling it apart into little pieces that's what makes an LED screen possible. It's where the birth of cell phones happened. Originally, there was only one phone tower per urban area, and as a result, only a few dozen people could get on their mobile
phones at the same time, and calls were dropping. It was very frustrating, and then engineers at Bell Labs had this idea, oh wait, what if we break up the urban area into individual cells and give them each their own tower, And then they design software so you could drive in your car from one of those cells to another without losing the call. And basically, modern mobile communication was born out of that cognitive process of breaking and.
Not everyone is aware, but that's how cell phone gets its name because the landscape is divided up into different.
Cells exactly exactly, and like so many things, that ingenuity is hidden behind the scenes. We just take it for granted, not realizing that this fundamental cognitive operation is responsible for it. So blending, which is a term first introduced by our colleagues Mark Turner and Jills Fauconnier, involves combining two or more sources. And you know, a smartphone is a beautiful example of a blend. Mermaids and centaurs are blends of
humans and animals. Compromise is a form of blending where you work out with another person, Oh, you know, what is our middle ground. I'll contribute something to the solution, and you'll contribute to something to the solution. Blending is so much a part of how we just approach our world. Again, we take it for granted, but that's how we get metaphors and house boats and fusion cuisine and so many of the things that are familiar to us in our world.
Actually, so let's talk about that for a second, about the things that are hidden behind the scenes and the things that are obvious. So one of the things about the world of art is that the bending, breaking and blending is overt, is done so that everybody can see it. And in the case of scientific breakthroughs or technological breakthroughs, it's typically covert, as in most people don't see the
things that's happening there. But the argument we made is that it's actually the same processes happening under the hood. Tell us about that.
Yeah, I think that's one of the art's great cultural contributions. In a sense, they are contributing to science in externalizing internal features of how our minds work in a way that is often hard to see. You know, there's a cool example with YouTube. When you're watching HD video, you're actually not watching HD video. You're watching a mosaic of different levels of resolution, where YouTube is monitoring your computer's bandwidth in real time and sending the resolution that'll make
it through. And the hope is that if there's enough HD in that stream, you just think you're watching a perfectly wonderful HD video and you don't realize that it's actually created by all these little fragments.
So you mean, what I'm seeing is some sort of rough video, and then when my bandwidth is better for a moment, I see the very clear high definition video, and then I see some mixed up stuff in there.
If it's done well, it happens all so fast that you don't notice the pebbles among pearls, and you just think, oh, this is great, My streaming is working perfectly. I'm not freezing, and so on and so forth. And if YouTube engineers have done their job, the creativity is completely hidden and you don't even know that it's there. You just think
you're watching a video. What's wonderful and significant about the arts is that the goal is actually to share the inner workings of the creativity and have it be out in the open, so you see the bending, breaking and blending in a way that everyone can share. There's an exhibition that the installation artist Christian Markley made where essentially he told the time by clips from movies that showed
a clock in the background at that specific time. So the way that installation works is it runs twenty four hours a day. You can show up at any time you want and say as long as you want, and each second is shown by a different scene from a movie. It's exactly the same principle at work in the YouTube, but now you're actually experiencing the bending, breaking and blending in front of you.
Okay. So one of the questions that comes up often is you look at some new invention and you think, wow, that came out of the blue. For example, in two thousand and six, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, one of the reporters there called it the Jesus phone, by which he meant it was an immaculate conception, nothing like that had existed before, and then it just showed up. But in fact, every idea has a genealogy that can
be traced in this case. You know, in nineteen ninety three, IBM had introduced a cell phone with a touch screen. Now this was very you know, earlier technology, So it was a big brick of a cell phone and it had just allows you little touch screen. But the idea is that there's a smooth progression from there to here. And this is true of all ideas. And this doesn't reduce anything about the amazingness of the idea, the importance
of the idea. But everything has a genealogy because we are remixing what's already in there and coming up with new versions of things. So the question is, you know, how do new ideas evolve.
So new ideas evolve, we would say through this cognitive process of bending, breaking, and blending. We take our storehouse with experiences and essentially our minds are like a food processor that scrambles it all up and comes up with new possibilities. And that ability to generate what ifs and hypotheticals is frankly part of what makes it most fun to be a human being. I don't think we appreciate just how much improvisation is part of our daily lives.
I mean, having a conversation is an improvisation. You know, cookie dinner can be improvising. It takes a lot of improvisation to raise your kids. Every time, we're making flexible solutions, combining our inputs and coming up with some new wonderful way to you know, entertain the kids or keep our loved ones interested in us. We are being creative and all of that relies on the bending, breaking and blending.
So given this, given that we absorb our world and remix it and spit out something new, how does your time and place matter?
So one thing very beautifully you've shared with your podcast audiences is that a lot of our brains development happens out in the world rather than in the womb. And that makes us neurologically incredibly susceptible to our environment and our upbringing. And you that with human creativity and our way that we build community, and you end up with
incredible diversity around the world. I know this very well in music my field, because you take somebody like Beethoven, who was probably the most experimental, radical European composer of his day, doing extraordinary things that were far ahead of his time, but he never asked people to detom their instruments to create beating. He didn't use the breathing into a fluid for expressive purposes and make extraneous noises, and
consider that part of the drama. But that was happening in honored traditions in Japan and the Far East at the same time, halfway around the world. Their notion of what was beautiful, what was meaningful was very different from Beethoven, and to the people in each of those cultures, those were complete, self contained, absolutely compelling worlds, and yet in many ways not with much overlap.
That's right, and this is why all new ideas evolve from the old based on your culture. One of the pictures that we have in the book is the evolution of Greek helmets through time, and it's fascinating to see the way that the models evolve and change, but each one is clearly a function of what came before it. But if you look at war helmets from across the world and some other place in the world, they are
quite different. And this is because we take whatever we have around us, whatever we absorb, and we use that as the fodder that we're operating on. So what's fascinating is that humans are so compelled to bend, break and blend all the time. We sort of never stop doing this, and so tell us about that.
You know, sometimes there's this sphere everything that can be done has already been done. There was even a book at the turn of the twentieth century that said all diseases had been cured. There was nothing left to do. And you know, artists are always anxious. You know, it's
all been done, there's nothing new. But the story of humanity is that there is no finish line because this software is running in our brains all the time, and just by bouncing off of what came right before us, we're constantly pushing the envelope and going farther and farther.
And so, you know, you go from the stone age of the very first knives to this amazing display in countries like Polynesia of knives of every shape and size, to you know, Swiss army knives and the latest gizmos that are sold on late in ITV and on and on it goes without stop, without stopping, and there's really nothing where you can say, well, we reached the endpoint and it can't get any better, including strativarious violins, where
now they're making them out of carbon fiber. They're lighter, they are more durable, they don't warp in different weather and people can't even tell the difference sometimes, and the new instrument sounds just as beautiful as a strad umbrellas you think, you know, most of us are like, okay, the umbrella. You know, it's functional, it does what it needs to do, keeps the rain off pretty much. People
have stopped working on that. Actually, so many people are trying to make umbrellas that there are four people whose full time job it is in the patent office to review patents for new umbrellas. There's nowhere you look where you say case closed, it's finished. Just stop right.
People are trying to patent umbrellas where the for example, the ribs bend the other way, or it's asymmetrical for the wind, or you wear it like a backpack, and on and on. Yeah, exactly. And in your field in music, how do you see that, this constant compulsion to bend, break and blend.
Well, you see that in covers of songs in a jazz improvisation, I mean, night after night, the same performer will go and play the same wonderful jazz standard somewhere over the rainbow. But it will never be the same way twice. And you know, if you walked up to that performer and said, well, you know, is that the last time you're ever going to do this, then will look look at you, you know, like what are you
talking about. The whole thrill of it is to constantly reimagine and you know, come up with a new version.
And you see this bending, breaking and blending in language all around us too.
Language is really built as a wonderful bending, breaking and blending tool. For instance, there's fringe for lan slang where syllables are flipped. So the word meshon, which means you're being mean, is sean May and originally it was developed by you know, people in the underworld, so the Katalkan code and the police wildn't understand what they were saying, but verlong became so commonplace that now just everybody in France uses it, and then abbreviations are great examples of breaking.
The word gymnasium is the Greek word for exercising in the nude, and we very comfortably turned that into jim with you know, a less exacting dress code and blending happens all the time in composite words railroad, heart, throb, suitcase, etc. And in fact, one of the interesting things is different languages will blend different words to express the same idea. So we call it a rail road. In French, it's
chamande fair, which means iron road. And part of the fun of excavating languages is to see how different brains in different communities are marring eye in different ways.
Yeah, you know, it's always been interesting to me how invisible these blends become to us. For example, I think it's the case that most people don't think about the word rainbow as you know, a bow like a bow and arrow that you get from the rain. But that's how language evolves, is by putting things together like that. Let's come back to this issue about science and art. So one example that is very cool is with chimeras. So in the world of art, there's this idea of
putting together different creatures. You mentioned a mermaid before, we're putting together a woman and a fish, and you get this mermaid. And what's interesting is that you see these same kind of things happening in science. So tell us about the goat named freckles.
So there's Freckles, a spider goat. How did that come to be? Well, spider silk is one of the strongest materials in nature and could potentially be used for things like bulletproof bests. But the problem is it's very hard to harvest spider silk. You put enough spiders together and they eat each other. It takes literally millions of them
just to create a few square yards of silk. So scientists were wondering, you know, is there a more efficient way that we could produce this, And there was a biologist who came up with the idea of splicing the gene or spider silk into the genetic code of a goat, and thus was born Freckles, the spider goat who secretes spider silk in her milk. And they've been able to harvest significant quantities of that by creating an actual, real life chimera.
So is what is happening in the brain of a chemist different than what's happening in the brain of a composer.
To some degree, of course, it takes special expertise and knowledge to be a chemist. That's really different from the preparation that takes to write a piece of music. But the amazing thing about human beings is that we apply our creativity to everything we do. So there is a part of what we are born equipped with that is a general purpose creativity software that can be mobilized for anything we care to apply our creativity to. That, again, is one of the superpowers that we have as a species.
This is really what has launched humans into this success that we've had compared to all our animal neighbors. You know, we've erected skyscrapers and composed symphony and invent you know, medicines and get to the moon and stuff like that. Because each generation that's born doesn't have to you know, just live the life of what happened before them, they can learn about that because of brain plasticity, they can absorb everything that came before them and then springboard off
that into the future. And the way they do that is by taking in all that data and then remixing it and coming up with new versions of things.
No, I mean again, not to take anything away from animals, but if you were like a guidance counselor for crocodiles fifty thousand years ago, and you know, what are you going to do with your life. The answer would be pretty much the same then as it is now. And if you were a guidance counselor for the earliest hominids, I mean to say they would be astonished at the possibilities of what a human being can do now, you know,
would be a big understatement. And every single bit of that is due to creativity running in every single human brain.
That's right, And we do see creativity happening in various ways in the animal world. There's just not nearly as much of it.
So, yes, there's creativity in the animal kingdom, for sure, but it's very targeted. So there are birds that design very colorful creative ness, but they sing the same song all the time. There are whale songs that change in pods over time, but they don't apply their creativity in other parts of their lives. What makes human special is we treat creativity as this all purpose, general purpose tool that we apply to everything that we do.
Right, So, as brains take in data, they're constantly bending and breaking and blending that data to come up with new things. And we do this more than other animals. And when we look at what is different or special about human brains, what we see are a few things. One of them is just the size of the core texas the wrinkly outer part. We just have much more of it than any of our neighbors as a relative
to our body size. And one of the things that gives is much more real estate in between the inputs and the outputs. So if you're a cat and I put some food in front of you, your visual system is going to see that and your motor system is going to eat the food. But with humans, because we have more computational capacity in between the in and the out, we can say, Okay, maybe I won't eat it, I'm on a diet, maybe I'll eat it later. Things like that.
We just have more options, more possibilities that we can take as a result. The other thing is we have these huge frontal lobes, that's the part behind the forehead, and this is what allows us to simulate what ifs, possible futures. And this is a really big deal. And this is what I've suggested in a different episode is what, at least at the moment, as far as we can tell, separates us from AI is that AI can be massively creative because it's constantly bending and breaking and blending things.
It does a really good job at that. But the thing that allows humans to do scientific discovery, at least the moment that AI can't do is think about what ifs and then evaluate those and think about, Okay, how would I know if I were writing on a photon and going the speed of light? What would things be like? What would things look like? That's what we are really good at.
Doing, building out what you're saying. A lot of the large languid models are also aimed towards the mean. They're aimed towards the average. They're aim towards the most common solution, because that makes the AI more likely to be correct. And humans are able sometimes to choose unlikely propositions and
then develop them and build them. So you know, you think about the theory of relativity, for instance, and so I sign comes up with the idea, wait, the speed of light is constant to all observers, rather than trying to fold that into our real life experience and our common sense says with how the world works, he's able to go beyond that, beyond any availab data that he had in his time, to realize that that meant you get heavier as you approach the speed of light, that
absolute simultaneity doesn't exist, that there's such a thing as superluminal connections. And right now AI systems are totally constrained by their data and they will always attempt to normalize it.
What's interesting is that you can push the AI by the way and force it to give you less and less probable answers. And interestingly, people talk about this as hallucination of these large language models. But another way to view this is hypothesis generation. It's really great actually at saying okay, well maybe this maybe that. The interesting part is it doesn't have the capacity right now to say, hey, here's an interesting hypothesis. Now I'm going to actually evaluate
that and think about it that way. It just doesn't have the capacity to do that. But what it does seem to have is the capacity to bend, break, and blend, which is very cool. So you know, ten years ago when people were talking about computers, people said, okay, well, computers can't be creative, and the reason was because they weren't doing bending, breaking, blending. They were just repeating whatever was put in. Now they're actually doing that remixing all
the time, which allows us to be creative. The interesting part is there are actually two sides to creativity. One is the generation of new ideas, and the other is the filtering. You say, Okay, well that was not so good. That was that's so good. And humans, you know, we happen to know what it is like to be other humans, and so we're pretty good at saying, okay, I'm going to bag that one and kill that one because that
won't be interesting to my fellow people. But computers at the moment aren't so good at the filtering part.
I one hundred percent agree that. Get back to the whole time and place. We're born into a particular cultural situation, and we are very aptible, and we're very sensitive to the community and how they will respond and what's taking things too far, what's so implausible, No one will understand it, what's so ordinary, it'll just get overlooked. And the computer right now isn't able to evaluate itself in that way
exactly as you're saying. It doesn't recognize when it has its own best ideas and then says, wait a second, that was a really good one. Let me build on that. And it has no sense at all of this. One will fly and that joke is just not funny at all.
Right, because it doesn't know what it is like to be a human and find something funny.
Right. Yes, And I think one of the most interesting things about AI creativity as it's developing is the light it shines on some of the unexplored and underappreciated facets of human creativity. So, for instance, AI is essentially a
great improviser. It works on the same principle as the yes and principle in theater, going from one thing to the next, to the next to the next, but never looking backwards, never questioning itself, never saying, oh, well, now that I ended up here, let me go back and revise the first chapter. We have this incredible time jumping, reverse chronology, flexible way of looking at things holistically and granularly.
I mean again, one is just awe struck at the power of the machinery that we have in terms of the flexibility of turning things right side up, upside down and inside out.
So how does our social context affect our creativity?
So it's great to have this machinery we've been talking about working in our heads, but what really supercharges is our need to engage each other. As you've shared on the podcast, brains are infotropic, so they're attracted to new information, and that's really critical for social bonding. Imagine waking up every day and saying that the same thing to your loved one, getting them the same present for their birthday,
cooking them the same thing for dinner. It's hard to imagine that a relationship is going to last very long because we tune out to the familiar, and there's a phenomenon repetition suppression, where the more stimulus is repetitive or predictable, the less attention we pay to it. And you can see this on neuroimaging scans, where the first time someone has shown a surprise, you know, a huge part of
their brain lights up. But then if you keep repeating that surprise at regular intervals, eventually becomes a tiny little dot in the brain. Their brain has made it part of its internal model of reality and doesn't care anymore. And that is fatal to social relationships. And as essentially the most social species on the planet, we learned to leverage our creativity to keep the people around us enchanted.
You know, often it's talked about the birth of human culture was sitting around a campfire telling stories after hunting wooly mammoths, and to a large degree, that probably gets to the heart of why we are such a creative species.
That's right. Yeah, you see it. At dinner party, someone tells the funny story and everyone laughs. You would never see someone then tell that story a second time, right then, right exactly, And nobody watches the basketball game from last week a second time. There's no reason to watch it a second time. What we care about is the surprise, the new information, that's right, And this is because the brain is constantly seeking to update its internal model, and
it does so by surprise. When it sees something that it was not expecting, then it knows, Oops, there's a place that I need to improve the model over there. And so that's why we're totally attracted to surprise and things that are novel.
And I would go so far as to say that creativity became one of our most useful tools for self generating surprise. In other words, we like our internal model of reality to always be under construction because that keeps us very engaged in alert and in a sense partners with consciousness and keeping us present in the moment and connected to each other.
Yeah, And in the animal world we see this trade off between exploration and exploitation. In other words, animals explore their environment and they try to figure out what's going on, and once they get it, okay, I can get the grubworms under these rocks or whatever. They spend about eighty percent of their time exploiting the data that they know, but across the animal kingdom they spend about twenty percent
of their time exploring new things. And it turns out this is evolutionarily very useful because you never know when the world is going to change. So if you're constantly keeping a finger on the pulse of other possible paths, that's the way to stay alive when things change.
And in a sense, that's the evolutionary roots of our creativity. We have the rest of the animal kingdom to thank for that exploration necessity being built into our brains, and then our need to build community kind of took that to the next level.
So that was my friend Anthony Brandt, and in the book we co authored, The Runaway Species, we examined how human brains generate creativity by constantly remixing its inputs, and this is we argue part of the basic operating system of the brain. So the way to think about this is if you look at a graphics program that says, hi, I rotate photographs by forty five degrees. The program doesn't care what the photograph is. The photo can be of
ostriches or kazoos or volcanoes or whatever. The program doesn't care. It just performs the rotation operation on the pixels. It just doesn't matter what the photograph is about. And this is the same thing your brain is doing. You are born in your moment of space and time, and you move through the world and absorb the art and science
and language around you, and that's what you remix. So, as Anthony said, if you're born in Japan five hundred years ago, you will write one kind of music, And if you are Beethoven born in Europe at the same time, you'll write a different kind of music because you're absorbing different data. And if you are in New York in the current day, you have a very different set of worldwide music to draw from. And if you're composing twenty five years from now, your diet will consist of ai
music and things you never even realized. You hadn't thought of new innovations driven by humans and by machines, and that's what you'll take to be the background furniture, and you'll in on that. So, given what we talked about today, I want to circle back to the controversies I highlighted at the beginning of the episode where Open AI is getting sued and Under Armour is getting criticized because people are saying that the AI is merely absorbing what is
out there and then remixing its own versions. And I think it's an interesting question to ask whether humans have ever done otherwise, because that's what human creativity is, and we typically like to compliment ourselves and tell the story of how we came up with things out of the blue,
leveraging our individual brilliance. But the fact is we are each born in a particular place, in a particular moment of time, and all we ever have to work with are the pieces and parts that our culture provides, pieces and parts that have each been touched on and worked over by the people before us. So, although it's a jagged pill to swallow, it's interesting to consider this possibility.
Let's say about that Under Armoured commercial that was accused of copying the styles of work from several other creatives without proper acknowledgment. If a human director had made that same ad a few years ago, we would have agreed. Of course, he took inspiration from the work of other creatives. That's his diet, that's what he has to draw from, and we certainly would have no expectation that at the end of his commercial he would list all the sources,
all the other commercials from which he took inspiration. We wouldn't say, hey, you remixed all these inspirations without proper acknowledgement. And in fact, this is what companies like OpenAI and Meta are arguing in court now that their language models learn from books the same way that humans do. The language models original work that is a transformation of its sources, just like humans do. Therefore, these companies are arguing in
courte that this training is legal. It is quote quintessential fair use unquote. So we're in an interesting time. Is it just human chauvinism where we're okay remixing things ourselves, but we don't want a machine doing it because it can do it faster. I don't know the answer to this, but I do think the questions about creativity will gain refinement as we get clearer on what human brains actually do and what AI does, and what these have in common.
In any case, one of the great pleasures of being here on this planet, whether we're surrounded by other humans or by machines, is that, even though we often feel like everything that can be done has already been done, there's just no end on the horizon for what this run of way species and our inventions will create. Next. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.